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Eleven words, for ten. What a start to the day. I opened my eyes sullenly, invading daylight cutting my short sleep shorter, and fell upward from my bed to stand and reel in dim bedroom stale air. I staggered forth, content to sit and write a short time, before embarking on a hot Phoenix day. I sat in the lazy chair, the one with rips and stains, covered in a patchwork colorful blanket, and propped my tired feet on the faux-naugahide stool to balance my computer and begin another journey. Writer’s Digest filled my screen, and soon I perused a list of prompts, each more interesting than the last, until at length I found a short, easy entry I could do. A ten word sentence, the prompt tempted. So easy, so short. I might still have time to call the university and perhaps eat an apple before children invade the day, before sunscreen and swimming and model airplanes become more important than world politics, insurance renewal, or late tax. I began.

Caught midstream last night in a new book, a Writer’s Digest special off the internet about the Tao of Writing, it must be free-writing, I thought. Empty the mind and the writing will follow. I vainly tried touching my ears to one shoulder and then the other, rewarded by a dull cracking sound much like a breaking chicken wing, and then drew a deep breath. I closed my eyes, and let the creative energy flow through me. Fingers touched the worn keyboard, found the raised index letters, and the cosmos poured in. I typed "The quick brown fox tripped over the lazy sleeping dog." I counted it on my fingers. Nine words. I needed one more. What would happen to that fox, I thought, the one who graced every typing student's keyboard since the beginning of recorded typing time. What? Slickly? Hardly. Quickly? Foxes are quick, but obvious. Tripping is painful. The fox tripped painfully. A descriptive with which I could identify.

“The quick brown fox tripped over the lazy sleeping dog, painfully." There, complete. Ten words or less, certainly fewer than 750, and not even a broken sweat. I counted again. Good Lord. Eleven. What have I done? So early in the day, and already the mold was broken, the die cast, the cliché bound and busted. Never a good omen.

I back peddled. I tried to fix it. I tried editing, removing, reshaping, revisiting. The sentence didn't work if the fox wasn't quick, and it had to be brown. The sleeping dog was definitely lazy; no amount of revision made it more attentive. Could the fox simply have tripped? I didn't want it to jump. It had jumped for a century, and it was time something else happened to the fox. Trip, it must, and by necessity, in pain, lest the sentence be visited by another ho-hum jumping fox. I was in a quandary, stuck, more so than the fox. I envied the fox, trapped for a hundred years in mid-leap, and finally liberated by the deceptively simple trip; at last free to go its way. How could I go free, like the fox, tripped by my own verbiage, and one nearly plagiarized at that? Could I plagiarize a cliché? No, I thought. It’s out there, like the fox is now, free and yet vulnerable to anyone who dared type it. My trap was more subtle. I tried to write freely, and fell victim to the word count.

I longed to crawl back into bed next to two sleeping dachshunds, each more like foxes than dogs, short-legged ones that never leap. I couldn’t return to slumber, not with this word count hanging over me like a suspended fox. I returned to the bed, surveyed the dogs, each blissfully unaware of the fox. I guessed that neither one had ever so much as counted a word; though I felt sure they counted foxes in their sleep. Perhaps the dog wasn’t lazy after all. Perhaps the fox wasn’t quick. Perhaps the fox wasn’t even brown. The fox tripped over the sleeping dog, painfully. I sacrificed two words, two precious placeholders to dumb down my sentence, and quickly found it overwhelmed by the fox’s pain. Why didn’t the fox just jump? Was the fox stupid?

I set aside my keyboard and eyed the dogs. I needed a fox to experiment, but it would have to wait another day.

My heart is my totem, a blackened beating taunt that soaks the Page with its prevail. Its blood becomes my ink as I stab the Pen into it. I heave forward with my hollow chest, entranced in my decay, sorry to say, that I am a writer of Darkness now.